Create a collaborative service culture in your call center

By Audrey Guskey, Robert Heckman | October 1, 1998

Reading time: 7 minutes

Abstract

As global and domestic markets become increasingly competitive, the ability to provide high-quality customer service will increasingly separate winners from losers. This article discusses high-quality customer service, including its importance in the success of a company, four facts of life that make its consistent delivery difficult and creating a collaborative service culture.

Research Topics:: Customer Loyalty | Customer Satisfaction Studies | Employee Opinion Studies
Industry/Market Focus:: Human Resources/Organizational Dev.
Content Type: Research Methodology

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Editor’s note: Dr. Robert Heckman is a professor at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. Dr. Audrey Guskey is a professor of marketing at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. They are also partners in Pittsburgh-based guskey & heckman, research consultants.

Is a telephone call center your company’s "front door?" In many businesses, the call center not only represents the company, it is the company. As global and domestic markets become increasingly competitive, the ability to provide high-quality customer service will increasingly separate winners from losers.

But delivering consistent, high-quality customer service presents a real challenge for most companies. In a typical service organization many customer service representatives (CSRs) are responsible for delivering customer service, and they are often among the lowest-paid, least-educated, and least-experienced employees in the company. In addition, there are four service facts of life that make the delivery of high-quality customer service consistently difficult:

1. Complexity. Services are becoming increasingly complex and information-intensive. In regulated industries such as financial services and utilities, governmental bureaucracies are constantly changing the rules. In the airline industry, sophisticated yield management programs adjust prices in real time, making it difficult for service representatives to understand, much less explain to customers, the company’s current offering.

2. Inadequate information systems. While increasingly powerful and sophisticated information systems let companies continuously tinker with and adjust their offering, these same information systems often don’t provide sufficient information to service representatives. With legacy mainframe systems still all too common, customer service representatives often do not have the information they need to resolve customer problems, or even give accurate information about current prices, schedules, and policies.

3. Problems, problems, problems. In most service delivery operations, the only people who call are those who have problems. No one calls simply to report that everything is going fine. And a few bad apples are simply impossible to please, insulting and abusing everyone they deal with. Under these conditions, it is all too easy for a service provider to develop a thick-skinned and defensive posture toward all customers.

4. Productivity and monitoring systems. The legacy of Taylor’s scientific management philosophy (i.e., that productivity is maximized when all workers conform to a detailed, standardized work process) is often seen in the control systems applied to customer service operations. Productivity systems combined with random monitoring leads many CSRs to develop whatever strategies they think are necessary to "make their numbers." A "make-the-numbers" culture can create a strong barrier to the delivery of quality customer service. In our research with a call center for one large utility company, CSRs consistently said that the quantitative targets inhibited their ability to deliver quality service.

These four facts of life exist to a greater or lesser degree in every customer service operation. Despite these barriers, however, you as a leader can help your CSRs deliver a consistently high level of customer service quality. Our research and experience lead us to believe that the answer lies in the creation of a collaborative service culture within your company.

What is a collaborative service culture?

A collaborative service culture is an environment in which both service providers and customers are predisposed to help each other by cooperating and working together to reach a mutual objective. The result is total customer satisfaction, CSR job satisfaction, and committed customer loyalty. Our approach to creating high-quality customer service rests on two important assumptions: 1) all service is collaboration, and 2) the most important collaboration is discretionary.

All service is collaboration. Services are delivered predominantly through service encounters, and in a service encounter the service itself is jointly created through an interaction between the service provider and the customer. The provider and the customer collaborate to create the service. The effectiveness with which they do this determines the level of quality attributed to the service. Thus, effective collaboration is at the heart of quality service delivery.
The most important collaboration is discretionary. While service collaboration can to some degree be mandated and scripted, it is ultimately within each individual CSR’s power to decide the extent to which he or she will cooperate. Leadership and management theorists since Chester Barnard (1938) have described the limits of formal authority in getting employees to contribute their best efforts. All high performance organizations have in common this ability to elicit discretionary contributions from their members - to create a culture where going above and beyond the call of duty is the norm.

Thus the fundamental challenge facing managers responsible for creating high-quality customer service operations is how to elicit this discretionary collaborative behavior from each customer service representative. If a manager cannot mandate or proceduralize the discretionary component of collaboration, what tools can be used to create a culture in which discretionary collaboration is an integral part of the underlying norms of the organization?

Creating a collaborative service culture

Five years of research have convinced us that there are three essential leadership actions necessary to create a collaborative service culture: 1) diagnose the current service culture, 2) create management commitment, and 3) give CSRs collaboration tools.

1. Diagnose the current service culture. Before beginning any organizational change program, a leader is wise to commission a thorough diagnosis of the current culture. Because no two organizations are alike, no two efforts to transform a service culture will be exactly similar. How can the current service culture be diagnosed? Information is needed from four crucial sources: customers, CSRs, managers, and organizational systems. The seeds of collaboration are sown when customers, managers, and CSRs are involved in the earliest stages of the transformation process, and resistance to change will be reduced

A variety of qualitative and quantitative research techniques can and should be used. Often an organization has in place a rich set of tools for measuring customer satisfaction. These existing tools can be a very useful part of the diagnosis process. Survey instruments can be used to learn more specific information about the state of collaboration in a culture, and these instruments can be targeted at both employees and customers. More in-depth, qualitative research will allow employees and customers to talk openly and freely, revealing underlying dimensions that survey instruments cannot uncover. Finally, organizational incentive and compensation plans, control systems, monitoring systems, and information systems are all artifacts which can reveal significant information about the state of a company’s culture.

2. Create management commitment. No effort to create a collaborative service culture can possibly succeed if both senior management and first-line supervisors are not committed to it. There are two major steps that must be taken if a cultural transformation is to succeed. First, the management team must understand the basic principles of discretionary collaboration. If the management team is not thoroughly familiar with these principles, they will simply apply techniques in a cookbook fashion. Second, in addition to understanding the principles of discretionary collaboration, managers must firmly believe that it is in their own best interest to implement such a program. If they receive mixed signals from executive management, from the compensation plan, from the allocation of resources in the budgeting process, it is unlikely that a program to create a collaborative service culture can succeed. Creating the right conditions in the management team is probably the most difficult step in creating a collaborative service culture.

3. Give CSRs collaboration tools. Only when the existing culture has been thoroughly diagnosed and the management team has formally committed to the creation of a collaborative service culture can the arming of the frontline service personnel begin. Service representatives must first learn the causes of satisfaction and dissatisfaction with service encounters. More important, they must learn what the causes of discretionary collaboration are, because the fundamental goal of creating a collaborative service culture is to ask customers for their help. This paradox is at the heart of the collaborative method. Service representatives must learn that the four magic words are not "Can I help you?" (although that is an essential question). But more important is the question "Will you help me?" Creating the conditions in which the customer wants to help the provider will create the collaborative service culture in which the customer is most likely to be satisfied. In a collaborative service culture, both customer and provider have the feeling and the mission of working together and helping one another to create a positive outcome for both.

The tools that CSRs need to create this climate are derived from the research on discretionary collaboration that we have been conducting for the past five years. CSRs can learn how to:

ask for the customer’s help;
better understand the customer’s situation;
communicate their situation to the customers;
capitalize on existing relational bonds and build new ones;
instantly understand the kind of customer they were dealing with and tailor their strategy toward that customer accordingly.

These tools can be taught to CSRs in several days in a workshop complete with plenty of opportunities for practice and role-play. However, more important than workshop training is the reinforcement and practice that must be provided when the CSRs get back to the job. Collaborative service culture training must be "just in time." If it is not immediately followed by a period of intense practical application on the job, the benefits of the training will be lost.

Not easy

As is the case with any organizational transformation, creating a new culture is not easy. The collaborative service culture described here may be fairly close to the existing culture for some organizations and very far away from the current culture of others. How far will determine the difficulty of the journey. However difficult, this journey will provide any organization with great rewards. A collaborative service culture will result in higher levels of customer satisfaction, greater customer loyalty, improved customer retention, fewer errors, and ultimately in lower operating costs for the customer service function.